AS I told you last week, I am quite happy to take on all the establishment political parties at once. In fact, I relish the fight. It’s like one of those all-in wrestling bouts where most of the other combatants are flabby and out of shape.

It does however get difficult when you not only have to take on three or four opponents at a time but you find that the referee is letting them get away with the electoral equivalent of eye-gouging too.

In this case the Electoral Commission is the referee and it has made a frankly astonishing decision that cannot be allowed to pass without comment.

The Commission – ElCom for short – has permitted a party to go on the ballot paper which has deliberately chosen a similar name to the UK Independence Party in an obvious bid to con the voters.

The party – largely made up of embittered political failures that we have chucked out of UKIP – has been formed with the name “An Independence From Europe”. That name ensures it is top of the ballot paper, which is ranked by alphabetical order. UKIP is, by contrast, at or near the bottom.

Worse still, its tag line as it appears on the ballot paper is “UK Independence Now”. If you gaze at your ballot paper with fire in your belly to vote UKIP and that is the first thing you see, there is a very real prospect of the eye being fooled and the cross going in a box you never intended.

We are already getting reports of people being upset to find out that they have sent in postal votes on behalf of An Independence From Europe when they meant to vote for us.

Given that one of the main reasons for the setting up of the Electoral Commission was to stop this anti-democratic, fraudulent practice of passing off, I find it absolutely staggering that it has permitted this party name and this description.

And given that this party has almost no media profile and no serious campaign structure or capability, if it records more than about half a per cent of the poll we will know for sure that it has in effect “stolen” votes from UKIP supporters.

This makes me extremely angry on behalf of my party but even angrier on behalf of the democratic process and all those voters who have already been or are about to be duped.

So far as I can see pretty much all the Electoral Commission has achieved in its 13 years is to preside over a monumental increase in postal voting fraud and to take a legal case against UKIP some years back that would have bankrupted us on a technicality had the Supreme Court not overturned a ruling in the nick of time.

ElCom was set up shortly after a huge row broke out when a party was set up calling itself the Literal Democrats. It didn’t win any seats, but it did cost the Liberal Democrats an MEP in the South West.

We in UKIP thought hard about mounting a legal challenge to “An Independence From Europe – UK Independence Now”. But we were advised that court costs would reach at least £100,000, with no guarantee of success or of being in time to alter the ballot papers.

So we press on and all we can do is to remind voters time and time again to look for us down at the bottom of the ballot paper, where we are listed as “UK Independence Party (UKIP)” and have our famous £ sign logo by our name.

There is only one party that can rock the political establishment. Only one UKIP. Please beware of cheap and devious imitations. It shocks me that I have had to issue this warning in a country that likes to regard itself as an advanced democracy.

But it is your vote and your democracy that I am desperate to protect. We at UKIP will keep our heads up and our dignity intact as we fight the last six days of this campaign. They aren’t making it easy for us but if you want to vote for UKIP then look down that ballot paper for that £ sign logo and help us to cause the political earthquake that this country so desperately needs.